As the Porter methane gas leak upends California’s climate progress; Bernie Sanders is the first 2016 presidential candidate to call for fracking ban. Attention to the environment and climate change is nothing new for Sanders; he has been endorsed By Bill McKibben and there is no doubt that the climate platform he has put forward is the strongest of any 2016 presidential candidate (Hillary has yet to reveal a serious climate platform).
Bernie has been ahead of the curve to recognize the dangers of fracking and was responsible for the fracking ban in Vermont.
As the ongoing Porter Ranch disaster continues to poison the air Californians are breathing, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and environmental experts are now arguing that the leaking well serves as “yet another example of the urgent national need to transition away from fossil fuels.”
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more, the failure at the Aliso Canyon well—which has for months been spewing thousands of tons of methane gas into the air and sickening residents of the town just 25 miles outside of Los Angeles—“is illustrative of a problem that is happening every day,” Mark Brownstein, the vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund‘s climate and energy program, told the Huffington Post.
“It’s a problem at gas storage facilities across the U.S.,” he said. “I don’t want people to lose sight of the fact that while this is a big pollution event with huge impacts to the community, and [one that] certainly upends a lot of progress that California has been trying to make on climate change, it really is symptomatic of a larger, more systemic problem of the oil and gas industry.”Brownstein explained: “A fair chunk of the emissions associated with the oil and gas industry in the U.S. come from these types of events: leaks on systems, equipment that fails, equipment that malfunctions.”
Bernie has been prescient on the crisis of climate change, just as he has been prescient on the issues of finance reform, civil rights and war and peace.
We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to elect the candidate with the judgment and vision to lead us into a safe and healthy future.